Any reader of Marilynne Robinson’s extraordinary works of fiction has
experienced how marvelously she explores the mysteries of human existence on—as
she calls it in her new work of nonfiction, Absence of Mind—our “tiny,
teetering, lopsided planet.” Robinson is fascinated with consciousness and with
the mind’s place in the universe, and her novels open readers to the worlds
within the world of each of her characters’ particular corner of the swirling
cosmos. In Absence of Mind, Robinson addresses these issues directly,
confronting the mind head on and arguing for its existence as an entity much
larger and more elusive than any merely biological or evolutionary function.

Written in four parts and commissioned for the
Dwight Harrington Terry Foundation Lectures on Religion in the Light of Science
and Philosophy, Absence of Mind has a clear mandate and agenda. The
Terry Foundation’s “deed of gift” states its desire that through its series of
lectures “the Christian spirit may be nurtured in the fullest light of the
world’s knowledge,” and while Robinson allows for an expansive and encompassing
conception of Jewish, Christian, and other spiritual wisdoms and philosophies,
her objective is certain. A believer in both scientific inquiry and religious
mystery, she wishes to reconcile what many on both sides of the
science/religion debate see as irreconcilable, but rather than actually
pursuing such a course, her book takes the stance of a factious attack on what
she refers to as “the closed circle that is called modern thought.”

Railing against positivism, behaviorism,
neo-Darwinism, Marxism, and Freudianism, Robinson points out how each of these
systems of thought not only offers an incomplete view of the world, but also
how incompatible they are with each other when taken as a whole and accepted as
a collective view of modernity. One of her most salient criticisms is in
pointing out the fallacy of what she describes as a key dictum of each of these
systems: “the notion that we as a culture have crossed one or another threshold
of knowledge or realization that gives the thought that follows it a special
claim to the status of truth.” Although the discoveries of Galileo, Darwin, and
Einstein certainly cross thresholds toward a more workable model of truth,
Robinson rightfully questions the common contemporary mindset that holds that
we were in error before a certain moment and only now we see clearly. This has also
been the mindset of many of the world’s religions and metaphysical
philosophies, however, and in honoring their valuable insights and wisdoms,
Robinson somehow fails to mention their own exclusionary claims to veracity.

Leaving the poets and saints and mystics undisturbed,
Robinson’s main targets in Absence of Mind are contemporary writers such
as E. O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, and Daniel Dennett—writers
whom she characterizes as taking a derisive stance toward religion and whom she
derisively labels as “parascientific.” One of her repeated methods of refuting
them is to call into question the very character of their thought, and many of
her arguments consist of choosing a vulnerable sentence in their books (and in
the case of Rorty and Vattimo’s The Future of Religion, an introduction
written by the book’s editor) and dismantling, discrediting, or lampooning it.
At one point, she even refers to an author’s colloquial explanation of altruism
(which is one of Robinson’s main arguments against neo-Darwinism) as
“sophomore-speak.” While her own prose is high-handed, one of the great
disappointments of Absence of Mind is that Robinson fails to dazzle the
reader with the flights of insight that this book’s subject matter should have
generated in a writer of such talent and profundity, instead maintaining the
cold and inelegant register of a defensive (and often offensive) polemicist.
This hardly seems the work of the author whose first novel, Housekeeping,
inspired a generation of writers to pursue the marvels of both the world and
the word.

The greatest contribution of Absence of Mind comes
in the book’s third chapter, “The Freudian Self,” in which Robinson
recontextualizes Freud and his times in fascinating detail and with an
extraordinary command of how Freud’s works interacted with the worldviews that
surrounded and inspired his own. Her ultimate aim in this section is to negate
certain Freudian and post-Freudian concepts that in her view discount the idea
of the individual mind living in an individual time, and with a deftness of
thought and knowledge and style, she largely succeeds, turning her
double-negative approach into a positive contribution to Freudian criticism, as
well as to the ongoing exploration of how the mind exists in time. Whether you
find yourself agreeing or arguing with Robinson’s conclusions (or agreeing and
arguing with them), this is a classically rigorous and beautifully hewn
essay that—like much of Freud’s best writing—is valuable both as an
intellectual artifact to be pondered and confronted and as a work of literary
artistry.

Despite its overall tone of enmity—and despite its
hand-wringing apprehension that our existence is being impoverished by the
perils of “modern thought”—Absence of Mind makes a positive and often
successful effort at showing us how both science and the mind are far more
expansive and inexplicable than many schools of thought would have us believe.
It may be unfashionable to think of the mind as a mysterious entity that exists
as something much larger than our already large brains, but when Robinson
delves into the farthest interior and exterior worlds and drops her offensive
defensiveness, she reveals in herself a mind that serves as a living example of
many of her best points. Perhaps few will be convinced by this book—its
arguments are couched in terms more suitable to those who will probably
disagree with it, while most sympathetic readers will be turned away by its
antagonistic tone—but Robinson’s learning in all the fields she discusses is
remarkable, and her ideas will certainly impress themselves upon the mind of
any serious reader, regardless of whether that mind decides to let itself be
changed.

Friday, November 19, 2010

Several Perceptions:

The mind is a
kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance;
pass, repass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and
situations. There is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in
different, whatever natural propension we may have to imagine that simplicity
and identity.

—David
Hume, from A Treatise of Human Nature

Benjamin
Franklin’s Autobiography has long stood as one of the most famous and
exemplary memoirs in American and world history, and Franklin himself has often
been held up as a multifaceted microcosm of America itself, for better or
worse. Naive patriots see the endlessly brilliant and successful Franklin as a role model for self-reliance, reading his Autobiography as an advertisement for individual initiative, while detractors see Franklin as a duplicitous facade-builder whose Autobiography hides as much as it reveals and ignores the fact that the vast majority of America—and of the world—has to sink a bit in order for a brilliant and ambitious individual such as himself to rise. Both views (and many more) easily affix themselves to the Franklin of legend,
of reality, and of his Autobiography, and although no one particular
reading of the man or his works can encompass his full entirety, examining the
dis-united states of his Autobiography and of its readers’ perceptions of it can offer great insight into Franklin himself and into the United States that
he ostensibly reflects.

As a text, the Autobiography
is a complete farrago: a wholly unintegrated mass of parts that hardly portrays
a coherent life at all. What’s fascinating, though, is that its four
soldered-together sections show the reader innumerable interconnected and
progressive sketches of Franklin that sometimes add up and sometimes don’t, and
this is perhaps the only true way to view a human being of his amazing range—or,
for that matter, to view any human being. Even the book’s obvious (and not-so-obvious)
lacunae tell us a lot about him and ourselves, and anyone who reads the Autobiography
with a bit of critical curiosity will discover volumes about how we—individually,
and as a country, and as a race of humans—aspire to be and, in Franklin’s words,
to be seen.

Joseph Siffred Duplessis’ portrait of
Benjamin Franklin, 1785

Franklin wrote the first section of
the book in 1771 when he was in England, and its stated form and purpose was to
chronicle Franklin’s ancestry and early life in a long anecdotal letter to his
firstborn son and confidante, William. Franklin did nothing without an eye to
the public, however, and when reading of his precocious personal exploits, we
need to keep in mind that our perceptions are as much in Franklin’s mind as are
his son’s. The book’s second section was written in France in 1784, after the
Revolutionary War had severed the deep bond between Franklin and his Royalist
son, and this section is expressly (and coldly) addressed to the public and was
written in response to the urging of friends who wanted Franklin to publish his
projected Art of Virtue, which only came to fruition as this short
second section of his Autobiography.

Franklin
began the third section of the book later in 1784 when he was back in America,
and here he returns to chronicling the progress of his fascinating history, but
the focus in this section changes from the personal to the public, and instead
of documenting what good he’d done for himself, he documents what good he’d
done for his city, country, and world. Franklin was obsessed with doing good,
and this is the longest section of the Autobiography, but what’s
fascinating is that even with the in-depth accounts of establishing schools, a
fire department, and the first lending-library, improving public streets and
streetlights, serving as a Colonel in the French and Indian Wars, attending to
various public offices, and detailing some of his experiments with electricity
and heat, the Autobiography doesn’t even come close to summing up this
astonishing man’s contributions to the larger public welfare. If his own
personal prosperity came at the cost of outstripping less gifted individuals
whose fortunes waned while his waxed—thus nullifying his personal example as a
universal model because of the impossibility of everyone rising through
his methods—his tireless efforts on behalf of public progress surely lifted the
world a bit higher and made life for his fellow human beings a bit easier and
lighter.

John Trumbull’s Declaration of Independence, 1817

The
Autobiography’s very brief fourth section was begun in 1790, in the last
year of Franklin’s life, and it merely continues a description of his efforts
in 1757 to get some legislation passed, and then the manuscript breaks off.
Thus the Autobiography of America’s most famous Founding Father, and
perhaps most famous individual, ends decades before arriving at the most
significant events and contributions that made him who he is to us. This
incompleteness is of course part of the book’s fascination, because in addition
to the selectiveness and creative license of Franklin’s self-portrait, the
vastness of the missing parts makes us see how impossible it is to conceive (or
even perceive) a full view of any individual human being. We round out much of
the subject of the Autobiography with knowledge gained elsewhere, but
even more than that, we fill in the holes with our own perceptions and
self-conceptions, whether they’re positive, negative, or deeply ambivalent.

What
I recommend when reading this fascinating and problematic work by this
fascinating and problematic human being is to keep your view of its subject,
author, and text from closing in any definitive fashion. Franklin can be both
hilariously self-conscious and hilariously un-self-conscious—and can be simply
embarrassing when he’s at his most un-self-consciously self-consciousness—but
despite his wild flaws and foibles, he truly meant to do good, as a world
citizen and as a writer of his own self. Perhaps the most good we can gain by
reading his Autobiography is to achieve a deeper understanding of who we
are—as individuals, as a nation, and as a world—by looking at ourselves through Franklin’s singularly
cracked lenses.

Irresistible Grace:

In an age when
Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu fundamentalists hold profound sway over
nations armed with nuclear weapons—and when many other non-religious but
nonetheless fanatically extremist ideologies threaten the world’s safety with
their urges to fulfill their purifying programs—it becomes imperative that we
examine not just the end-results of these perfectionist words made flesh (i.e.,
the Crusades, the Holocaust, Stalinism, Maoism, 9/11 and its worldwide
aftermath), but their roots in our own desires and psyches. It’s easy to point
to others and marvel at their insane beliefs and actions, but it’s only when we
interrogate our own urges to be right and to be justified (across the globe and
often beyond) that we can see ourselves as human beings with the exact same
capacity to be as misguided as the most fervent religious terrorist or the
most patriotic purveyor of state-sponsored torture.

James Hogg’s strange, terrifying,
and largely forgotten novel The Private
Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner explores the inner and outer
worlds of “justified” terror, delving into the personal terror within the most
haunted fanatic and producing a work that’s unsettling in every sense of the
word. Working contrary to many of the solid-rock beliefs portrayed within its
pages, Hogg’s novel undermines all sense of certitude and even undoes the faith
that we as readers put in its own varying and contradictory narratives.
Employing and improvising upon a host of literary conventions, devices, and
styles, Hogg’s 1824 masterpiece is thus timely to a twenty-first century
audience in both content and form and has even been cited as a forerunner of
postmodernism.

Published anonymously because of its
scandalous nature, the novel’s sections comprise a ninety-page Editor’s
Narrative, the sinner’s 140 pages of Confessions, and an additional fifteen
pages of Editor’s Narrative at the end. In the first section, an unnamed editor
reports the details of what he’s been able to gather about a strange family
history that involved a series of murders in
late-seventeenth-century/early-eighteenth-century Scotland. The opening pages
recount the marriage of the elderly Laird of Dalcastle, George Colwan (“a
droll, careless chap”), to a sternly pious young woman who tries to escape but
is returned to Colwan by her father. The unhappy match results in one
acknowledged son, also named George, and another son, Robert, who may or may
not have been fathered by the mother’s spiritual advisor, the fanatical
Reverend Robert Wringhim. Although Hogg is careful never to mention Calvinism by name, Wringhim’s beliefs make the reader infer this affiliation, and the young Robert
is raised separately from his brother, reared in an extreme version of this
faith, and is adopted by Reverend Wringhim.

A brockengespenst, which may be
what George sees on his hike.

As young men, George and Robert meet
for the first time in Edinburgh and become bitter enemies, the latter soon
shadowing his popular older brother to haunt his every move. Wherever George
goes, and at whatever hour, Robert somehow takes his place next to him to taunt
him and ruin his peace of mind. The despondent George begins to fear going into
public, and after attempting to seclude himself, he makes an unplanned trek into
the hills on a beautiful morning and has a truly bizarre and ghostly
altercation with Robert that nearly results in fratricide. After a resulting
courtroom scene, George retires with friends to an inn and finds himself in a
pointless quarrel with another young nobleman named Drummond, who quickly
leaves in anger. Soon afterward, a knock on the door seems to signal his
return, and George steps out to meet him, doesn’t return, and is found dead the
next morning. Drummond flees the country and is assumed guilty, and Robert soon
afterward claims his patrimony and installs himself as the new Laird of
Dalcastle.

A complex series of investigations
follows, and through somewhat fantastical means, two women pursue a thread of
circumstances that leads them to implicate the younger Robert and a mysterious
and elusive friend who now seems to be goading him on to murder his own mother.
When officers arrive at his mansion, however, they find no trace of either Robert or
his mother, at which point the narrative reaches the end of the details passed
down about the account and then introduces the memoir left behind by Robert,
declaring that “We have heard much of the rage and fanaticism in former days,
but nothing to this.”

This makes me laugh.

Robert’s memoir—a kind of novel
within a novel—shifts the text to a radically different perspective and tells
the tale from his point of view, and true to the words that Hogg ascribes to
the novel’s “editor” (who we must remember is a character too), the “rage and
fanaticism” portrayed in his Confessions is like nothing in any known
literature, either fiction or nonfiction. As a child under the Reverend’s
tutelage, Robert learns that the Elect are pre-ordained by God and that no act
or belief can influence the spiritual fate of who does or who doesn’t go to heaven, an extreme doctrine known in Calvinism as “Irresistible Grace,” a far-flung extrapolation of Saint Augustine’s original concept of a persevering grace that keeps chosen believers from falling away from their salvation.
Exerting a wildly manipulative influence on Robert and his mother, the Reverend
struggles and prays to discover God’s will concerning Robert, and one day he
announces that it has been revealed to him that Robert is one of the Elect.
This day of revelation finds Robert at his most spiritually elated—and
relieved, as his deeply cruel and spiteful manipulations as a child and young
man have made him fear damnation—but it is also the beginning of an astonishing
and relentless descent. Seeking solitude in the woods to pray, he immediately
meets a stranger who distracts him from his task and draws him into a
theological discussion that seems to echo the Reverend’s teaching, initiating
an uneasy but unshakable association in which the stranger, whose looks keeps changing
and who only goes by the name Gil-Martin, takes the logic of Robert’s faith to
its most extreme lengths and leads him into a life of beliefs and acts that are
simply beyond belief.

Evaluating the stranger from within the frame of reference of Robert’s confessions, the reader sees that Gil-Martin is clearly the
Devil, but while Robert develops increasing fears about him as the narrative
progresses, the logic that the Elect are forever chosen and justified keeps
convincing him that Gil-Martin’s murderous suggestions are not just reasonable
but are perhaps even the will of God. Unable to elude Gil-Martin as a constant
shadow, his situation mirrors (and causes) his haunting presence by his brother
George’s side. The dual doppelganger effect becomes further accentuated when
Robert writes that even when alone he feels an uneasiness in his own skin, as
if there were a second self inside of or somehow concurrent with his own being.
Some of his language recalls the ways that Thomas De Quincey writes about his
own lack of ease with his body and mind in his famous 1821 memoir, Confessions
of an English Opium-Eater, and at one point Hogg even has Robert write a
line that directly alludes to De Quincey’s call of hope within his pain,
quoting the Psalms: “O, that I had the wings of a dove….” The self-loathing and
terror and inability to escape or transcend that Hogg portrays to such extremes
is certainly influenced by De Quincey’s language of addiction, but Robert’s
memoir takes things much farther. This is certainly no case study, but Robert’s
tortured childhood, his warped upbringing and religious indoctrination, and his
heightened capacity as an adult for unspeakable cruelty (urged on by an
inexorable outside agent) clearly illustrate Hogg’s view of how fanatical
mindsets and already unhealthy minds can combine to take a set of beliefs to
the most appalling extents, with dire consequences for everyone
involved—especially for the fanatic himself, who may in fact be the most
cruelly tortured victim.

Making his novel and its horrors all
the more ambiguous, at the end of the book Hogg has the “editor” systematically
dismantle the facts that we believed about the story and memoir and dismiss the
existence of Gil-Martin as a figment of Robert’s sick fantasy world. This
novelistic ruse may seem like a dirty trick because of its placement at the end
instead of at the beginning, but a close examination of the book’s various
parts reveals that the editor’s dismissal is far from authoritative. He claims
that all the information in the first Editor’s Narrative is based on oral tradition
and can hardly be taken seriously, but this can in no way account for the
tightly interwoven connections between the initial Editor’s Narrative and the
Confessions—connections that are so cleverly and complexly plotted that the
reader is constantly checking one against the other to piece together timelines
that add up almost seamlessly and only contradict each other in ways that their
subjective natures would be expected to do. There’s also the simple fact that
the murders and many of the other events involved police and other officials,
who surely would have left extensive records. So the book’s editor, who belongs
to a circle of writers with whom Hogg had a very uneasy relationship, makes his
own judgments on the case as suspect as those handed down through gossip.

Surely
an influence on Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, whose cyclical system
of doubles, intricate stratifications of time, and profound emotional and
physical violence forms a perfect storm of self-perpetuating terror, Hogg’s
novel also seems to anticipate the bifurcating ambiguities of Thomas Pynchon’s The
Crying of Lot 49. As in Wuthering Heights, Hogg also makes extensive
use of regional dialect, but he has much more fun with it, and despite all of
its horrors, the novel often uses its varied voices and approaches to introduce
extremely enjoyable comic relief. As in Pynchon, Hogg delights in all of his
devices, and he even makes an appearance himself at the end of the novel. Hogg
had published an article on the case in Blackwood’s Magazine the
previous year, and a section of his article is excerpted in the second Editor’s
Narrative, but when the editor goes to look for information, he runs into Hogg
at the market, where Hogg dismisses his efforts as folly and goes about his
business of trying to sell his livestock.

An illustration from The Private Memoirs
and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

There
are great diversions to be found in The
Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, but at its core there’s definitely not
much fun in its view of fundamentalism, and the novel’s deepest tones
are of resounding terror. Hogg was neither a psychologist nor a sociologist,
but his explorations of the profound suffering at the root of Robert’s haunted
journey give great insight into the fanatical mindset, illustrating how it can
even bring demons alive to further its mission. Although he has his editor
dismiss the memoir’s supernatural aspects, Hogg was certainly insinuating that
the Devil plays a significant role in the ostensibly holy programs of religious
mania. Whether we believe in any of this or just see it as a metaphor for madness, it’s
clear that Robert was haunted by a specter that made itself very real to him,
giving the stunned reader of this shocking novel the sense that these specters
can appear to any troubled soul of any persuasion, whether religious, ideological,
or political, and that the repercussions of following their haunted urgings can
become devastating to everyone involved when made flesh in the real world.

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Hopes Defeated: Thomas De Quincey’s

Near the end of
his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Thomas De Quincey describes a
great philosophic book that he’d planned and abandoned because of the weakness
of mind and body that a lifetime of opium use had brought upon him:

I had devoted the
labour of my whole life, and had dedicated my intellect, blossoms and fruits,
to the slow and elaborate toil of constructing one single work…. This was now
lying locked up, as by frost, like any Spanish bridge or aqueduct, begun upon
too great a scale for the resources of the architect; and, instead of surviving
me as monument of wishes at least, and aspirations, and a life of labour
dedicated to the exultation of human nature in that way in which God had best
fitted me to promote so great an object, it was likely to stand a memorial to
my children of hopes defeated, of baffled efforts, of materials uselessly
accumulated, of foundations that were never to support a superstructure,—of the
grief and ruin of the architect.

Working
intermittently throughout his life as a essayist and journalist, De Quincey
read deeply in philosophy, both ancient and modern, and he planned to construct
an opus inspired by one of Spinoza’s unfinished works, but waylaid by his opium
use, he never got to become a philosopher himself, and despite producing a
large and wide-ranging body of work, he is today almost solely known for his
memoir of hopes defeated.

Serialized in two consecutive months’
editions of London Magazine in 1821, when De Quincey was thirty-six, the
first version of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater was hurriedly and
haphazardly composed during a short period when his opium-use was at a
temporary minimum. He promised a third installment that was to elaborate upon
his opium dreams, which provide the most haunting and affecting—and
tantalizingly brief—section of the narrative, but he was unable to deliver on
the extension and left even this short work’s superstructure unfinished. The
1822 book edition contains an appendix explaining why he hadn’t been able to
continue the account, reporting in excruciating detail his battle with his addiction and with his body, and along with the few earlier pages describing his dreams,
this appendix offers the book’s most penetratingly raw portrait of De Quincey’s
tormented existence. Appearing so briefly at the end, these horrors
show us what De Quincey either couldn’t or wouldn’t give us in the whole of his
story, leaving the reader with the impression that only the pressure of meeting
a deadline (and failing) had squeezed some of the darkest truth out of him.

Knowing that his opium-dreams were
to provide the greatest fascination and appeal for his memoir, it’s clear that
De Quincey planned on describing them at great length, but in building toward
them in his “Preliminary Confessions,” he too often diverts the reader—and
himself—with both too much and too little foundation. The rushed 1821/2 version
describes how he ran away from school and ended up in London, where he nearly
starved to death, but it glosses over his motives for leaving school, fails to
explain certain logistical and financial details of his journey, and gives the
reader no idea of what brought him to London in the first place. In place of such information, De
Quincey regales the reader with his intellectual achievements, which are both
formidable and fascinating but which are no substitute for the physical and
psychological truths that led him to a life of drug addiction.

The London
segment of the memoir offers more valuable—and moving—material, because here we
see De Quincey become both physically and emotionally human. Starving, he finds
refuge—but almost no food—in a lawyer’s house, where he shares a floor with an
orphan girl whom he calms during the ghostly night hours. His violent hunger
affords him very little rest at night, and during the lawyer’s business hours in
the house he meanders the streets, where he befriends a young prostitute named
Mary, who becomes a deeply sympathetic companion and who at one point literally
saves his life. Their friendship and their accidental separation—a separation
that haunts him for the rest of his life—give the reader access to some of De
Quincey’s most profound emotions, and as he desperately tries to keep himself
alive and connected, he truly becomes alive for the reader. This period of
deprivation also lays some of the foundation for his subsequent addiction,
because it’s sickness and pain that a few years later lead him to opium, which
is at first a revelation to him and which for many years he uses only once a
week for recreation. Then about ten years later it’s a recurrence of the
intense stomach pains that he’d experienced during his earlier hunger that
leads him to a lifetime of daily use, his stomach pains probably a recurrence of
the overload of adrenalin that’s pumped into the body by out-of-control anxiety,
an experience described by many drug addicts who are desperate to numb the
pain, most famously in our era by the pop musician Kurt Cobain, who was sadly never
diagnosed in his lifetime.

Although he’s obfuscated much about
himself, the descriptions of his suffering and of his kinship with his fellow
sufferers allow the reader to feel a similar kinship with De Quincey’s
sensitivity and fragility, and so when the book finally arrives at its
ostensible subject—opium—we have enough of a grasp of the author’s frame of
mind and body that even the book’s narrative elisions and diversions don’t keep
us from comprehending how powerfully this drug affects the human being who
simply wants a respite from his suffering. De Quincey divides this final
section into two parts: “The Pleasures of Opium,” which are marvelously
enticing and gorgeously elucidated, and “The Pains of Opium,” which are the
real heart of the matter and which even in their truncated state give the
reader a profoundly terrifying tour of the addict’s physical and mental
horrors.

An illustration by Laurence Chaves ofConfessions of an English Opium-Eater

The memoir made De Quincey famous,
and its exquisitely hewn hall of terrors has influenced generations of writers—most
notably Edgar Allen Poe, Charles Baudelaire, and Jorge Luis Borges—but this of
course didn’t alleviate any of De Quincey’s suffering during his lifetime or allow him to become
the writer that he felt he was meant to be. In 1845, more than two decades after the first edition of Confessions of an English Opium Eater, he published sections of a never completed work called Suspiria de
Profundis, which comprised short, fantastical prose pieces and which was
billed as a sequel to the Confessions because of the works’ fevered
affinity to the author’s opium-dreams. Then in 1856, for inclusion in a volume
of his collected works—which also included a revised and expanded but still
uncompleted Suspiria de Profundis—he produced a revision of the Confessions
that was twice as long as the original but that still failed to give the reader
what it promised. Rather than completing the work’s original plan or expanding
the section about his dreams, he instead quadrupled the length of the “Preliminary
Confessions” and merely added a short piece from Suspiria de Profundis
as a bizarrely disconnected coda.

The 1856 revision has much to
recommend it, especially in how it fills in the details of De Quincey’s
childhood motives and methods—and, most significantly, his early struggles with
his health—but rather than standing as an autonomous and completed masterpiece, the
revised version works more as a lengthy and often tedious explication of the
more lively and imperfect 1821 version. While revising, De Quincey was working
from a severely corrupted printing of the text—it was the only copy he could
get his hands on—and he both cleans up some of its mistakes and enriches
certain sections and passages, but mostly he just adds enormous chunks of
material to the beginning and sews it all together into a kind of lopsided
Frankenstein’s monster. It’s often fascinating to read the intricate details of
how his early life worked, but the interpolated digressions are often
intolerably dull and pointless and in fact make De Quincey much less of a
sympathetic character than before. The passage of time has allowed him to name
many names that were left out of the original version, and this occasionally
affords De Quincey the chance to draw richer portraits and to make more
complete connections for the reader, but it also causes him to aim torrents of
abuse at people who he feels have wronged him, especially Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, who was also an opium addict and who criticized De Quincey after the
first edition of the Confessions appeared—a criticism that results in
astonishingly frequent, involved, and vitriolic reprisals in the revised Confessions.
Conversely, De Quincey’s adoring passages about William Wordsworth’s world and
works paint an incomparable portrait of the Lake District and provide some of
the book’s richest and most rewarding passages.

An illustration by Giovanni Battista Piranesi ofConfessions of an English Opium-Eater

The most jarring addition to the
1856 revision, however, is the author’s extensive claim for the good that opium
has done him over the course of more than five decades. Although it may be
possible that opium helped to keep him alive through certain periods of his pained existence, the
idea that it corrected his respiratory problems and kept him from developing
tuberculosis is simply wishful writing. De Quincey should not be faulted for
trying to put a positive spin into his painful memoirs—and he should also not
be faulted for simply being an addict, which can happen to anyone unfortunate
enough to be born with a human body—but this unfinished and contradictory book tells the
real story despite itself. The section vindicating his lost/saved years of
addiction comes right before the almost completely unrevised “Pains of Opium”
section, which in contrast hits with even more astonishing force—although he
silently deletes the horrific 1822 appendix and replaces it with the wholly
incongruous “The Daughter of Lebanon,” from Suspiria de Profundis,
followed by a different appendix expounding upon his family name and providing
an expanded account of one of his servants. Compounding the wild imbalance of the
life and memoir is the fact that he still couldn’t deliver any elaboration on
what he knew to be his Confessions’ greatest draw: his dreams. Claiming
that the dream-material that he’d prepared in journal form had either been lost
or stolen, De Quincey is unable to conceal the truth of his wholly disordered
existence, and the uncompleted and uncompletable book—which wasn’t at all the
philosophical book that he always intended to write—stands as his true
memorial: an unforgettable and lasting memorial, but nonetheless a memorial of
hopes defeated.

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Love is a Cattlefield:

In classical
literature the ekphrasis—a detailed description of a work of art or
craftsmanship—was a common literary device that served as an enjoyable
digression and variation on how the larger story was being told, while also
working to mirror or illustrate an important aspect or theme of the work. Often
filling in a historical or psychological background, it wasn’t just a digressive
pause in a self-reflective and self-contained narrative backwater, but rather actually
added momentum to the story and often forcefully threw its subject back into
the flow of events. The most famous ekphrasis in all of literature is
Homer’s description of the shield of Achilles in Book 18 of the Iliad,
taking well over a hundred lines to draw back into a brilliantly forged mirror
of humanity at peace and war before completing its concentric circles and
thrusting Achilles forward into the bloody fray. Displaying a work of art
within a work of art for the reader/listener to experience as both a discrete
frame and as a fully connected part of life, this device’s reflexive aspects
are clear, reminding us that the work as a whole is itself a complete artifice,
an enclosed and reflective circle that’s nonetheless an integral and interwoven
part of the thread of our own lives. Books may be just an artificial series of marks bounded within static leaves of paper, totally unfazed by the rush of life around them, but
they’re still physical objects that we hold in our hands in the real world and
that often effect our actions as much as living people do. In Homer and Vergil,
and in the millennia of subsequent writers employing some variation of the ekphrasis as a meta-narrative strategy, the device usually serves as a brief reminder that we—like the works’ characters (and
authors)—are both looking and living. But one brilliantly singular “literary
pendant,” Longus’ second-century Greek novel Daphnis and Chloe, takes
the ekphrasis to its farthest extreme, forging the entirety of its
narrative out of a description of one single painting.

In a brief prologue the narrator
comes across a painting in a beautiful grove—with the painting described as being
even more beautiful than the grove itself—and he gives us this brief snapshot of it:

Wanting to write something about the
painting, he finds someone to interpret its story for him so he can create “an
offering to Love, to the Nymphs, and Pan, and something for mankind to possess
and enjoy.” He claims that it will “cure the sick, comfort the distressed, stir
the memory of those who have loved, and educate those who haven’t.” In the four
perfect books that compose Daphnis and Chloe, Longus does all of that and
more. Much more….

Arthur Lemon’s The Wooing of Daphnis, 1881

Discovered two years apart by a
goatherd and a shepherd, respectively, Daphnis and Chloe are abandoned orphans
raised to follow their adopted parents’ simple lives and livelihoods. Daphnis,
a boy, becomes a goatherd, and Chloe, a girl, becomes a shepherd, and as they
tend their flocks they become friends, grow up together, and slowly—and
beautifully, and hilariously—begin to discover the mysteries of love. Cited as
a model for the book and film The Princess Bride, Longus’ novel takes the couple
through a cinematic procession of nascent love, abduction, piracy, war,
predatory suitors, astonishing recognitions, and, of course, a thoroughly
satisfying happy ending. Although it fulfills all the typical genre expectations
for the ancient Greek novel, which was a popular form of entertainment in its
time and was rarely taken seriously as an art form, Daphnis and Chloe is
so exquisite and so uniquely crafted that it serves as the exemplary Greek
novel while at the same time transcending its genre to equal some of the finest
works of ancient poetic literature.

The
way that Jean Racine’s play Phèdre adheres to its immediate audience’s
expectations for a generic love-interest diversion while offering
immeasurably more artistry and pathos to the larger world theater, Daphnis
and Chloe deftly aims its derring-do Greek-novel complications into a kind
of Cupid’s-arrow that keeps its unwavering sights on the luscious magic of
youthful love discovering itself. One of the great reminders that love and lust
are totally marvelous and pure and new for every single human being, this
novel’s depiction of ingenuous innocence reads like a Garden of Eden where sin
is impossible and where the flesh—along with the heart and the mind—follows the
decrees of its true unsullied nature.

An illustration from Daphnis and Chloeby Konstantin Somov

Longus is
extraordinarily sophisticated and doesn’t merely portray innocence and
experience as mutually exclusive, but rather depicts their symbiosis in a way
that’s also borne out in his representation of how the rustic countryside is
inextricably linked to the urbane order of the city, which also mirrors the
reflective relationship between effortless nature and created art. Part of Longus’
innovation within his genre was how he introduced the idyllic themes and features
of pastoral poetry into the forward-moving Greek-novel narrative, balancing the
two modes in a delicious back and forth that allows for both action and
reflection. As in Theokritos’
Idylls and the early works of Vergil,
simple yet refined shepherds tend their flocks in an Arcadian utopia while accompanying
their lovers’ plaints with tunes on the Panpipe—a
bucolic dreamland that draws upon a highly cultivated genre form that’s in fact
as artificial as the Greek-novel structure that encompasses it. In Longus’
inspired hands, though, these two synthetic modes combine into something beautifully
organic and alive.

In their
confusion about the desperate pangs that they’re both experiencing, Daphnis and
Chloe ask an old cowherd named Philetas about Love (aka Eros, aka Cupid), after
he tells them a story about his own experience with the lust-god, and he replies,
“There is no medicine for Love, no potion, no drug, no spell to mutter, except
a kiss and an embrace and lying down together with naked bodies.” They find
that this excites and frustrates them even further, still not knowing a thing
about doing what comes naturally (as Ethel Merman described it), and even
though they observe their livestock mating—but not lying down, which Chloe
objects to as contradicting Philetas’ advice—it’s only when Daphnis is
initiated by an older woman and given instructions about how to (and how not
to) proceed with Chloe that Cupid’s arrow starts to attain the balanced thrust
of its final trajectory.

In composing this ekphrastic essay on Longus’ artistic masterpiece, I’ve consulted three
different editions of the novel, all of which are worth mentioning to an
initiate looking to enter into its mysteries. The most useful by far is the
Christopher Gill translation that’s contained in Collected Greek Novels, which was edited and introduced by the incredibly well informed and informative B. P.
Reardon. Moses Hadas’ Three Greek Romances also contains good
introductory material, and as an edition is unique in including Dio
Chrysostom’s The Hunters of Euboea within its genre classification, and
Hadas’ translation is the most artistic of the three but is also occasionally
overly precious. Of special interest to art-lovers is Paul Turner’s
translation, which contains forty-two color lithographs by Marc Chagall,
creating a reverse-ekphrasis with its illustrations of a novel that
illustrates a painting. The prettiness of the Hadas and Turner editions masks
an ugly truth about Daphnis and Chloe’s world, however: the common practice of “exposure.”
When Daphnis and Chloe are abandoned, they’re exposed to the elements to die, a
kind of postpartum abortion, and Hadas and Turner’s translations elide both the
word and the concept, making the babies’ abandonment seem much less unsettling
to the modern reader. This was part of ancient reality, though, and part of
Longus’ art, and the Gill/Reardon edition gives us the most honest English
representation of the Greek original.

An illustration from Daphnis and Chloe by Marc Chagall

Knowing this
detail, which takes place in the book’s first few pages, the reader will be
happy with whichever edition best suits his or her tastes and/or scholarly
requirements. I prefer the unmasked version—or, more accurately, the
least-masked version, which is the best that a translation can achieve—because
I believe that people don’t need to be protected from either truth or art. Because
this is a work whose truths and artifices are wholly enmeshed and are as primal
and complex as the intermingling world itself, the much larger interplay of
love and art and reality that’s represented in this extraordinary novel form an
artistic truth that’s so moving and so profound that its arcing thrust both
transcends and encompasses its specific—and novelistically idealized—universe.
Integrating both the natural and the human sphere into an ever-renewing cycle
of love, Daphnis and Chloe cannot fail to reach its mark in the reader’s
united mind and body.

Saturday, July 24, 2010

Blood on the Tracks:

The literary
output of the former Czechoslovakia (which in 1993 was split into the Czech and
Slovak Republics) is as tumultuous and as politically colored as was the ever-metamorphosing and almost constantly occupied state itself. Its capital,
Prague, is most known in the literary world for being Franz Kafka’s birthplace,
when it was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. At the end of World War
I, Czechoslovakia declared independence, but in 1939 it was divided when
Germany annexed the Sudetenland and then attacked eastward. Kafka, along with
most of the Prague intelligentsia of the time, was a German-speaking Jew, and
he would have been murdered in Auschwitz along with his sisters and the rest of
the city’s educated class had he not died young, in 1924. After World War II,
Czechoslovakia then came under the rule of communism and was dominated by
Soviet influence until 1989. As a result of all this subjugation, the country’s
literature suffered greatly, especially under communism, which favored Social
Realism and devalued autonomous artistic and personal expression. Worldwide,
the most famous Czech-language writer is Milan Kundera, who’s known for fusing
the political with the personal and the sexual in his works, but the writer who
first started to break away from dogma and into the realm of true art was
Bohumil Hrabal, and his breakthrough novel was 1965’s Closely Watched Trains.

While Hrabal’s and Kundera’s work is
still very much tethered to their country’s shifting political environments—in
Hrabal’s case because he had to work under communism and in Kundera’s case
because he often wrote in opposition to it from exile in France—they both
focused more on the art of their novels than on their politics. Hrabal wrote The Legend of Cain, the original version
of Closely Watched Trains, in 1949,
but because of the political climate of the time, it remained shelved until he
revised it for publication a decade and a half later. In the opinion of some of
Hrabal’s avant-garde contemporaries, the published version is somewhat less
shocking (but better written) than the original, and his revision may have
helped it pass the censors, who were easing their restrictions at the time, but
its anti-Nazi politics probably helped as well, the novel’s subject matter
illustrating that politics were unavoidable as part of twentieth-century Czech
life, whether you were specifically writing for the current regime or not.

A scene from the 1966 film version of Closely Watched Trains

The novel’s young protagonist,
Miloš, has just gotten out of an asylum after slashing his wrists and returns
to work at the local train station, where that night he ends up taking part in
the sabotage of a trainload of Nazi munitions. Through a dazzling array of
flashbacks and varying narrative techniques, the reader learns that Miloš tried
to kill himself after a sexual tryst that failed because of premature
ejaculation, and as Miloš’ first-person thoughts meander through the current
day and through his and his family’s and his town’s past, the novel paints a
kaleidoscopic picture of a world that’s at turns—and often at once—disgustingly ugly and almost unbearably beautiful. The isolated point of view
that Hrabal creates through Miloš’ reflections allows for a deeply personal
vision of a world whose natural and human elements can combine in his head into
the most lovely and terrible combinations. Hrabal is fascinated with human
cruelty toward animals—and toward fellow humans, the distinction between the
two often breaking down as Miloš watches and contemplates the suffering of all
sentient existence—and some of this novel’s scenes are horrifically painful.
Miloš’ connection to the pain in every living eye allows him to look at the
retreating Nazis with the same sympathy that he views the slaughtered animals,
but while his final actions distinguish him as a kind of hero, they also show
him to be as capable of steely inhumanity as everyone else, illustrating that
among the vast array of humanity’s possibilities for action in the world,
“inhumanity” is in fact a misnomer, because only human beings can act with
inhumanity.

One of the great achievements of
this novel is that its pathos is balanced with wonderful humor and vitality,
its cast of characters revolving around each other with romance, longing,
absurdity, vanity, hilarious deviance, and a healthy (and/or perhaps unhealthy)
dose of sexuality. Perhaps meant to be comic, the novel’s correlation between
virility and political action can be somewhat troubling, though, both to male
and female readers—to the former because the idea that men must rise to action
is confining, and to the latter because serving as ciphers for male ability is
insulting. Hrabal was an enormous literary influence on the younger Kundera,
and in Kundera’s works—which often revel in the humiliation of women while the
male characters partake in masculine philosophizing and political action—this
tendency is sometimes taken to extremes. But in Closely Watched Trains, both men and women take active militant
roles, making this novel much more intertwined and ambiguous in its gender
assignments than any of the works of the somewhat wayward disciple. Perhaps
further tempering Miloš’ “heroic” sexual/political salvation, the ironic
relativities of his tragic ups and downs serve as reminders of the absurd—but
often absurdly necessary—follies that both men and women partake in during war.

A young Bohumil Hrabal

Although
the world of politics—including sexual politics—is inextricable from any kind
of reality that Hrabal could have experienced or written about, this novel was
embraced by the public and the literati alike as an emancipation from mere
message and as a triumph for artistry. Torrents of blood course through every
arterial passage of Closely Watched
Trains—political blood, sexual blood, animal and human blood—but mostly its
blood is the blood of art taking on a sanguine life of its own.

Cunning Stunts:

Of all of James
Joyce’s abundant gifts as a writer, narrative drama was his least developed, and
perhaps his least innate. His focus on inner dramas—emotional, artistic,
sexual, spiritual, etc.—relegated mere storytelling to the sidelines of his
work, perhaps as an overt strategy but perhaps also because Joyce’s relentless self-consciousness
caused him to write in labyrinthine circles and paralyzed his ability to move a
narrative forward (note that the closest he comes in his entire body of work to
telling a story that focuses on an actual event is the sketch collected in Dubliners
that’s merely entitled “An Encounter”). This bodes poorly for anyone looking
for drama in Joyce’s one play, Exiles, but as always with Joyce, there
are other reasons to read this work. Unfortunately, the reasons aren’t
intrinsic to the play’s artistic value, but instead mostly consist in examining
Joyce’s mindset, his artistic and personal direction at the time—he was at a
crossroads between A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses—and
his literary intentionality, all of which help us understand some of the more
complex and thorny shades of his more important works.

Joyce idolized Henrik Ibsen, and Exiles
is a very clear attempt at an Ibsenian portrayal of the realistic dramas of
family life, an approach that in the Norwegian playwright’s time was
revolutionary and that had a inestimable impact on Joyce’s decision to focus on
“ordinary” heroes, such as Ulysses’ Leopold Bloom, rather than on
“heroic” heroes, such as Bloom’s mirror-opposite inspiration, Odysseus. While
Ibsen’s plays scandalized viewers with the reality of their goings-on, however,
Exiles instead attempts to scandalize with its ideas, its emotional
interiors, its backgrounds, and its attempted revision of family life. None of
this actually works in the way that Joyce hoped, because his attempt at
furthering Ibsen’s approach simply fails as drama, and what actually
scandalizes is the unpleasant view of Joyce’s frame of mind that this play
reveals to readers of his novels and stories.

Although dazzling and innovative in
terms of prose in form, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is
actually a pretty abysmal novel, partially because its story is paper-thin, but
perhaps more so because its main character, Stephen Dedalus—Joyce’s literary
surrogate self—is a pretentious prick whose artistic aims seem to be caused
more by negative reaction than by a positive interest in creativity. Dedalus claims
that he will (defensively) employ “silence, exile, and cunning” to “forge in
the smithy of [his] soul the uncreated conscience of [his] race.” It’s nearly
intolerable. But then, completed and published six years later, a miracle appeared:
Ulysses. And one of the great leaps forward for Joyce is that he decided
to split his surrogate self into two characters—into Dedalus and Bloom,
a surrogate father and son (for Joyce and for each other) who allow for
extraordinary reflection and growth and healing. The idea that Joyce may have
had this intention all along is a comforting one for readers who are turned off
by Dedalus’ initial idiocy. But Exiles’ Joyce-surrogate, Richard Rowan,
extends the egotism of the original Dedalus to outrageous lengths and forces us
to revise our view of Joyce’s trajectory—and of Joyce himself.

A vision of the life Joyce could
have taken but didn’t, Exiles depicts the return of writer Richard Rowan
and his family to Ireland, where Richard’s friends Beatrice and Robert re-enter
their lives, with Richard’s wife, Bertha, serving as a crux for the
psycho-sexual power-play between the reunited characters. Playing upon a
similarly conjectured alternate version of another great exiled writer, Dante
Alighieri, Joyce loads his play with heavy-handed symbolism and symmetries—and,
more pointedly, asymmetries that explore what could have happened if he (or
Dante) would have returned to his native city. As with Dante, Richard’s muse during
exile is named Beatrice—with the last name of Justice, which in the Paradiso
Dante’s Beatrice partially symbolized, the pilgrim-poet putting words in her
mouth that “teach” him that justice held primacy over compassion as the universal
law—but unlike in Dante’s case, Richard’s Beatrice is still living and upon
return is no longer the crucial figure in his personal drama. Richard and his
family have been living abroad in Italy—mirroring both Dante’s exiled wanderings
and Joyce’s own self-exile—for nine years (the Dantean number that symbolized
Beatrice), and the play comprises three acts, like the three books of the Commedia.
These may all just be the typical Joycean overload of literary correlation and
allusion, and some of it’s just a play on elements that Joyce had on hand, such
as the serendipitous last name of his own cousin, Elizabeth Justice, but the
idea of returning rather than forging forward, as Dante did and Joyce would
continue to do, is an intriguing one. Or it would be if Exiles hadn’t
gone so awry.

Dante and Beatrice

Focusing on the human elements of
life rather than on a “high fantasy” like the one that Dante constructs as his
ideal, Exiles shifts its attention away from the non-idealized Beatrice
and toward the very real Bertha (as a contrast, Dante’s wife, Gemma, is never
once mentioned in all of his works—nor is her existence even alluded to, unless
she’s the “Donna Gentile” of La Vita Nuova, which isn’t likely). In having Richard make this shift, Joyce
embraces in artistic form the very real love that he has for his common-law
wife, Nora, whom in Italy he’d truly come to adore and accept as his
life-partner. In turning his face to reality this way, though—especially toward
carnal reality—Joyce composes a grotesque vision of an artist constructing a
world around himself that’s as fantastically egotistical as anything Dante ever
imagined. Richard’s friend Robert has his sights on Bertha, but rather than
making this play dramatize a standard love-triangle competition, Joyce has
Richard encourage the pairing because it will further his aim of creating a new
order, where traditional rules no longer apply, but where Richard is both lord
and sacrificed lamb and Bertha’s sexuality is his crucifix.

This inverted take on sexual
possession is as absurdly macho as the outdated caveman battle that Richard
deems to be beneath his ostensibly enlightened emancipation from any kind of
old order—an emancipation that in fact ties him as much to his fellow sexual
slaves as it does them to him. In his real, non-literary life, Joyce
entertained similar ideas about the specter of infidelity, especially on Nora’s
part, but he seems to have been unsuccessful in making their relationship break
with all convention in the way that he strove for in all other aspects of his
life and art. Richard is therefore an imagined vision of a complete new order: “the
uncreated conscience of [his] race”. What’s profoundly disappointing is that
none of this is meant to be satiric or even ironic, as Joyce’s own handwritten
notes further illustrate (notes that were discovered in Paris after Joyce fled
the advancing Nazis and that are appended to the Penguin edition of the play).
Even Vladimir Nabokov’s intensely painful Lolita knows to mock the self-crucifying
parts of itself—“Ladies and
gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs,
the misinformed, simple, noble-winged
seraphs, envied. Look
at this tangle of thorns.”—but but despite its self-consciousness, Joyce’s ludicrous pseudo-drama isn’t
even self-aware enough to be funny, on purpose or even accidentally.

Perhaps Exiles’ only
redeeming aspect—other than as a key that unlocks an unpleasant door into Joyce
and his work—is that neither Richard nor the reader/audience are privy to what
actually happens between Robert and Bertha. Part of this is simply a literary
trick, comparable but vastly inferior to the question of whether Stephen
Dedalus’ brothel-experiences actually happened in A Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man, and part of it is Richard’s even more self-centered
insistence on Bertha’s “freedom,” keeping himself purposefully blind while
still dictating the terms of his blindness. Richard’s cunning manipulation of
her silence keeps them all in the exile that he requires, and this literary
stunt may be the one innovation that holds the play together. It’s a thoroughly
repulsive togetherness, though, and it’s largely been ignored by the dramatic
and critical world. Almost nobody has seen, read, or written about this play,
and so even though its tangle of thorns is useful to Joycean masochists,
perhaps Joyce simply should have left the world of the stage silent.